Michelle Teheux: Give those kids some poker chips

Friday

Nov 27, 2009 at 12:01 AMNov 27, 2009 at 8:46 AM

How can we be lamenting dismal school report cards, stretched school budgets and the disastrous state budget and not see the obvious solution to all three? We must immediately legalize gambling for kids. How many tots know how to play blackjack? Roulette? I bet half of the 7-year-olds in this state cannot even play a decent hand of poker. This is very bad, because if we don’t get our students hooked on gambling young, I don’t know how we’ll ever raise enough cash to run our schools and a good portion of state government.

Michelle Teheux

How can we be lamenting dismal school report cards, stretched school budgets and the disastrous state budget and not see the obvious solution to all three?

We must immediately legalize gambling for kids.

How many tots know how to play blackjack? Roulette? I bet half of the 7-year-olds in this state cannot even play a decent hand of poker.

This is very bad, because if we don’t get our students hooked on gambling young, I don’t know how we’ll ever raise enough cash to run our schools and a good portion of state government.
We started out with the lottery to fund education. And indeed, lottery money does go to the schools. Of course, funds that were used for education then migrated off to other state needs, leaving schools no better off. Fortunately, no citizens noticed this bait-and-switch.

We brought in riverboat gambling to improve the economies of ailing river towns. Technically, the gambling takes place on a real boat, even though the boats never move a foot from their moorings. But having gambling on a boat was seen as morally superior to having gambling on, say, regular old land. Since I’m not a specialist in morals, the difference is beyond me, but I trust our politicians who insist there is an important distinction.

I would propose we add a new gambling category to the Illinois Standards Achievement Test.
A sample question might be: “If while playing five-card draw, you are dealt an ace of spades, a 2 of clubs, a 2 of hearts, a jack of hearts and a king of diamonds, which cards, if any, would you discard and how many cards would you ask the dealer to give you?”

Younger children could be taught blackjack. It would offer a secondary benefit of teaching them to count to 21, thus improving their math. But much more importantly, if they enjoyed the game, it would be just a matter of time before they hit the boat.

Not enough people are playing the lottery or visiting the gambling boats right now, which is why we’ve moved onto video gambling in bars. Of course, people have been gambling on these machines all along without any tax money being collected, so it makes sense to bring the gambling out in the open and gain the taxes.

The downside is that since most of these machines are located in bars, we’ll have to lower the drinking age so kids can get in there and do their part.

The most important component to this plan is to go ahead and install a row of video gambling machines right in our schools. Of course we’d want strict rules that children are not to play the games when they are supposed to be in class, except when the state really, really needs more tax money.

Think of the opportunities this will bring the gambling industry, which can introduce a line of child-friendly games featuring popular cartoon characters.

I don’t anticipate any objections from the schools. The same arguments that allow students to spend their lunch money on vending machines full of sugary sodas and snacks instead of eating a standard lunch apply. The only really important question is whether the machines make money.

Since all of them do, we can go ahead and line up the new video gambling machines right next to the soda and snack machines.

In no time at all we’ll be asking, “Deficit? What deficit?”

Pekin Daily Times Editor Michelle Teheux can be reached at mteheux@pekintimes.com or (309) 346-1111.